Designing optical metro and access networks for future cooperative cellular systems

Using Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission and reception techniques poses challenging latency and capacity requirements on the backhaul network infrastructure of cellular access systems. On a small scale, these requirements can be fulfilled by using upcoming optical technologies like Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) Passive Optical Networks (PONs). On a metro scale, however, it is unclear to which extent CoMP is feasible. For a metro-wide cellular network deployment, we propose different backhaul network architectures and analyze their capability of fulfilling CoMP requirements. The analysis shows a trade-off between the ability of reusing existing metro network infrastructure and the area that can be covered using CoMP techniques. Based on this, we provide not only an understanding of which architecture approach fits best for a certain scenario, but also point out necessary hardware upgrades required for supporting CoMP in a desired target area.